Recent court decisions, Congressional legislation and foreign governmental self-help actions appear to be aimed at transforming the new millennium’s icon of free speech — the Internet — into a semi-free speech source. In February, a California court ordered an entire Web site to be shut down to prevent the publication of a disputed document. In terms of foreign actions, a Pakistani agency used self-help technical means to disable an American Internet site to stop it from disseminating content. Legislatively during the year of 2007, the U.S. Congress introduced an unprecedented number of bills intended to impose mandates on or limit access to social networking sites for the specific purpose of restricting speech before it occurs. The above instances of prior restraint of speech and others exemplify a movement towards making Internet speech into semi-free speech.

In Bank Julius Baer & Co. Ltd v. Wikileaks, 2008 WL 554721 (N.D.Cal.), the Northern District of California issued an order shutting down a U.S.-based Internet site for posting internal documents accusing a bank branch in the Cayman Islands of money-laundering and tax-evasion schemes. The plaintiff, a Zurich-based bank, stated that an employee illegally posted the documents on the Web site of Wikileaks, the uncensorable version of Wikipedia, and sued Wikileaks, alleging it had posted confidential financial data.

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